Does your Cintre have a dual (USB and SATA) interface? I've heard of these having various issues with the SATA connection.
I own four of
these Apricorn SATA enclosures and have been very happy with them. I use them for nightly backups of my SBS 2003 Servers (about 100GB of transfers nightly, all verified after the backup). This SATA housing has NOTHING between the SATA drive and the SATA controller in your PC, so there's no difference between the external drive and any other drive that's mounted inside the PC.
But, NO, I haven't actually used this with Vista. But I can't imagine why it wouldn't work, since it's electrically IDENTICAL to an internally mounted SATA drive.